Last night on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck spent a considerable amount of time attacking the Chinese for the deplorable conditions endured by much of their workforce. Employing his trademark overwrought sarcasm, Beck ticked off the indignities of working for the Chinese company Foxconn, like low wages, overcrowding, substandard company housing, and high worker suicide rates.

Now, I know that the Glenn Beck show isn't big on context, self-awareness, or accurate retellings of American history, but it's more than a little ironic for Beck to be outraged about inhumane working conditions in China and simultaneously portray the American Progressive movement as the “cancer” of American politics, given that much of the Progressive agenda was aimed at correcting those same injustices of industry.

Beck's description of life at Foxconn is essentially a modern-day retelling of working conditions in American factories and mines at the beginning of the 20th century, when, according to Rutgers professor John Whiteclay Chambers, America's industrial accident rate was “among the highest in the world.” In his book The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, Chambers recounts the exploitative and “feudalistic” model employed by the southeastern Colorado mining industry:

In the soft-coal fields of the foothills of the Rockies, some 30,000 Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Mexicans scratched a living out of the earth in isolated canyon communities. Three corporations, one of them owned by the Rockefellers, controlled the lives of these people, not just employing them but owning the land on which their shacks were built, the schools, churches, saloons, and the company store where food, clothing, and supplies were sold at marked-up prices. The corporations censored movies, magazines, and books, proscribing the works of Marx and Darwin and Omar Khayyám's Rubíyát. “We wish to protect our people from erroneous ideas,” an official explained. Wages were lower than elsewhere, the disease rate was high, and the death rate in the mines was twice the national average. But the company maintained control through force and terrorism, employing spies and dominating the civil government and the police. Protesters found themselves ejected from their jobs, their homes, and the community. In short, the corporate tyranny deprived the workers and their families of their fundamental rights as citizens. [Page 67]

Chambers goes on to explain how a strike broke out in 1913 which eventually led to violent conflict and a “civil war in the Colorado mine fields” which was only resolved after President Woodrow Wilson (in Beck's mind, the architect of the Progressive plot to destroy America) sent in federal troops. In the end, the workers won slightly improved conditions and recognition of their union (unions being another of Beck's punching bags), and Congress appointed the Commission on Industrial Relations, which found that “industrial violence stemmed primarily from industrial oppression and lack of adequate worker representation.”

The Progressive era represented the first real attempt at reforming industrial practices and ensuring the rights of American factory workers and miners -- a goal that wasn't realized until Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies enabled federal protection of those rights. By calling out Chinese companies for their abusive labor practices, Beck is, in some ways, channeling the Progressive spirit that sought to protect workers from industrial depredation.

But Beck, when he discusses the American Progressive movement, never talks about the workers. Instead he focuses on Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt or whichever historical figure he's decided is the new face of the destruction of America. That's because Beck is a demagogue, and he isn't going to let historical context get in the way of his fearmongering.